It was of course recognized from the first, however, that it is very difficult to distinguish between the practically simultaneous advent upon a drop of two or three separate ions and the advent of a doubly or trebly charged ion, but a consideration of the frequency with which ions were being caught in the experiments under consideration, a change occurring only once in, say, 10 seconds, seemed at first to render it improbable that the few double, or treble, or quadruple catches observed when the field was on could represent the simultaneous advent of separate ions. It was obvious, however, that the question could be conclusively settled by working with smaller and smaller drops. For the proportion of double or treble to single catches made in a field of strength between 1,000 and 6,000 volts per centimeter should be independent of the size of the drops if the doubles are due to the advent of doubly charged ions, while this proportion should decrease with the square of the radius of the drop if the doubles are due to the simultaneous capture of separate ions.
Accordingly, Mr. Harvey Fletcher and the author,[59] suspended, by the method detailed in the preceding chapter, a very small positively charged drop, in the upper part of the field between
and
([Fig. 12]), adjusting either the charge upon the drop or the field strength until the drop was nearly balanced. We then produced beneath the drop a sheet of X-ray ionization.
Fig. 12
With the arrangement shown in the figure, in which